Welcome, Leo. Be bold about what you want and who you are. Be bold about your commitment to life, to your relationships, to your family and whatever you think of as your tribe. Attend to the details of life as necessary, work your way through any minor setbacks, and proceed forward — something real is about to happen…

NUMBER TWO:

now is the time to clear up any lingering secrets you may be keeping from someone, which would include withholds or convenient misunderstandings. what you reveal now will server the purpose of healing, while what you delay or avoid discussing will have undue power to cause problems in the future. you may be in a situation where you are discovering so much about yourself that you haven’t said that you don’t know what to include in the conversation. i suggest beginning with any withholds that you’re aware of as such or clarifying any known misunderstandings created by how you’ve presented yourself in the past. you know the time has come to live more transparently. what is nice about the current moment is that others are well poised to get used to that idea.

I’m always being chastised for finding things boring. I can’t count the number of partners who have criticized me for that, everyone likes to think that what they love is so fascinating, nobody wants to see your boredom but these boys are so masturbatory and they drone on about their fucking music and they don’t say anything worth listening to and I can not believe that I am always wasting my time with them. Why am I so attached to my own boredom? Why do I feel crazy when I want to leave a boring party, how deeply have I internalized the sense of boredom as socially inappropriate? You owe it to the world, you owe it to your partners to nod and coo soothingly as they drag on and on, you owe it to your professors not to roll your eyes in class as they ramble on about the community of fucking learners that we’re building and the ways that we’re a family, you owe it to your fellow feminists to bring a delicious dish to the potluck (No More Potlucks, most relevant feminist journal name ever), you owe it to your fellow activists not to roll your eyes as they talk about Marxism GOD they’re so dull.

I’m always complaining in corners but I’m not doing anything riskier than that. I am so angry about how bored I am all the time, it’s my fault for being bored FINE but I feel like standing up and doing something about it would mean letting loose this destructive force of feminist boredom and I would fuck my entire life up, and maybe that’s the way to do it, maybe we should ‘attack what destroys us’ (thx cute stranger at the workshop on insurrectionary queerness), maybe we should cause a scene, anything not to be bored

Everyone will hate you if you take up so much space, it’s oppressive, you’re asking for too much

Boredom is a code word for something here and I don’t know what to say about that, I’m bored because I will not let myself act because if I act I’m afraid of what I might do. This all comes down to what I learned in a second-year movement for actors course, we spent weeks on walking, I earned a credit for rolling around on the floor with my classmates, I learned more about myself there than anywhere else, ever. And it’s all so applicable, embodiment and feeling are not separate. And it’s cheese and it’s trite but I learned in that class that I couldn’t force a stretch, I couldn’t force a partnership in contact improv, I could only be present in my body and with that of my partner. Also I keep learning that I can’t pick and choose my ugly feelings, some of them are necessary for me to care about anything at all (like activism! eg) and some just look ugly to everyone so I can’t do activism in a lovable way, I can’t control that, I can try to frame my rage in ways that are sharp and thoughtful and careful and necessary but I can’t just feel rage in convenient ways and the same goes for boredom. Boredom is anger and impotence, boredom is dead weight, boredom is invisible/inexplicable fatigue. Feminist boredom is rage about something you can’t explain in any way that’ll make it seem legitimate, feminist boredom is closely related to hysteria mobilized as a radical force, feminist boredom feels like the futility of trying to talk when nobody gets it, feminist boredom is what we felt in middle school, feminist boredom is snapshots of a daughter-in-law (she shaves her legs until they gleam like petrified mammoth tusk, the drained and flagging bosom of her middle years), feminist boredom is what happens when you’re trying not to die at fifteen (fave quote in high school, wrote that shit on everything) and everyone wants you to be so much more boring, everyone wants you to just be content

Sometimes my boredom is unfair, sometimes I’m better served by a closer examination of what I want to dismiss

not all of this connects for me, but i’m often getting called out for saying things are boring, john chastised me about it over christmas, and i recently almost wrote a post about how i’m not allowed to say things are boring anymore, how it’s so boring of me to say things are boring, and last year i went through a weird angsty phase after R said he never gets bored, and i was like, HOW CAN THAT EVEN BE. what does it mean that he doesn’t get bored? and that i do? is it because i’m actually boring? why can’t i just chill with boring people and enjoy it? or why can’t i sit around campfires and think it’s a mesmerizing blast? i probably shouldn’t use this post to validate my boring prejudice. but.

been a rough two weeks. words of wisdom from a kind (and incredibly eloquent who’s not even a therapist) friend:

Every relationship is supremely flawed at many points. You have to believe that the process of change, uncomfortable honesty and discovering new things about yourself (and the other) are big reasons why life is worth living. Anger, sadness, frustration, embarrassment are all parts of everyone’s set of feelings and it’s not OK just to talk about them in objective terms. They get played out in the most intimate relationships and they require us to be fluid and experience them and oddly take joy in the rawness and discomfort of expressing things that we are well trained to tuck away.